This was a posted a little while back, but I’m guessing some of you haven’t seen it yet. Over at the SPTechWeb site I wrote an quick article where I reviewed three of the more popular ways (they weren’t pioneered by me btw) of handling scrolling in SharePoint 2010 specifically as it relates to mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android. The post was inspired by all the SPTechCon attendees that asked about mobile devices as well as my co-worker Todd Klindt for wanting to push the boundaries of SharePoint 2010 blogging for a public facing site. SPTechWeb – SharePoint 2010: Mobile Devices and Scrolling

Things have been a little crazy over the past month, but now that the holidays are upon us I have a spare second to actually toot my own horn a little (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Everyone probably already knows this, but I figured I should still do a blog post to announce that at the end of last month my SharePoint 2010 branding book was officially published: Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design – Published by Wrox This was my big project for 2010. Myself, John Ross, Jacob Sanford, Paul Stubbs, and Larry Riemann worked on creating a book for both beginners and professionals that want to learn about making SharePoint look as great as it performs. Here is the Table of Contents for the book: Foreword. Introduction. PART I: INTRODUCTION TO SHAREPOINT BRANDING. Chapter 1: What Is SharePoint Branding? Chapter 2: What’s New in SharePoint 2010. PART II: BRANDING ...

Last month, an article I worked on for MSDN with Andrew Connell was published. It is a refresh of a SharePoint 2007 article we wrote that includes a sample master page for the fictitious Adventure Works Travel company. I’m pretty excited that we had the opportunity to write this article. I think it is a great introduction to the topic of planning, creating, and properly packaging and deploying a heavily stylized public facing SharePoint 2010 site. You can read the MSDN article now at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg430141.aspx

Another quick post to let everyone know that I have updated the starter master pages that are up on CodePlex. There are a couple fairly important fixes in them so if you are already using the old version you may want to think about updating your code to reflect the changes. I’ve tried to highlight all the changes by posting my WinMerge change report. Some of the changes are very minor (like spacing and comments) and some are more important like the navigation changes and a fix that is included for the View dropdown in the ribbon. Also, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that came up to me at SPTechCon in Boston to let me know you are like the starter master pages, good to know that people are finding them useful. As always you can grab my latest starter master pages from: http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com UPDATE: 2010 Starter Master Pages can be found ...

This is a topic that I’ve been asked probably a hundred times since the SharePoint 2010 bits were released. Before I get into how I solve it, I’ll provide a little back story. To quote from my upcoming book, Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding & UI Design: There are three site templates to choose from when creating search sites in SharePoint 2010: Enterprise Search Center, Basic Search Center, and FAST Search Center. Unlike most other sites in SharePoint 2010, these sites do not have v4.master or even nightandday.master applied to them; instead, they have minimal.master applied to them. If you have a custom master page that is based on v4.master, nightandday.master, or even one of the typical starter master pages and apply it to one of these search center sites, you notice that the search center doesn’t work properly. This is because the page layouts and pages that are created by default for these search center ...

I was asked today about hiding the Recently Modified menu from SharePoint 2010 Team sites. If you aren’t familiar with the menu, here is a screenshot of it: I did some poking around and it seems that the wiki pages add to the PlaceHolderLeftActions of the master page. While you could remove the placeholder, I’m sure it is used for other things. The safer thing to do would be to hide the Recently Modified section like this: <style type="text/css"> .s4-recentchanges { display: none; } </style> You can either add that to the master page or custom CSS for your SharePoint site or you could add it to an individual page as discussed here: http://blog.drisgill.com/2010/09/sp2010-branding-tip-12-hiding-quick.html

With the release of the IE9 Beta yesterday (http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/) I’ve already started getting questions about whether HTML5 / CSS3 can be used with SharePoint. There is technically nothing that would stand in the way of using either with SharePoint (note, the page won’t validate as proper HTML5 code… but that should be obvious). That being said, I thought it would be interesting to take some SharePoint 2010 master pages and change the DOCTYPE to HTML5 and see how they look in the IE9 Beta. So I changed out the typical DOCTYPE with: <!DOCTYPE HTML> Also note, by default, most SharePoint 2010 master pages have the following meta tag in them: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" /> This locks the page to displaying in IE8 rendering even in IE9, so I had to change this to IE=9 as well. With the DOCTYPE set and the meta tag changed, the master pages renders as an HTML5 page. Here ...

A question I get asked almost every week. Randy, how do I hide the Quick Launch for just one page in SharePoint 2010. The answer is simple my friends: Content Editor Web Part with some specialized CSS. Note, this code is written specifically to work with v4.master, any other master page may need different CSS code to hide the Quick Launch. Edit a page, Site Actions > Edit Page Click in a wiki text or rich text area and from the ribbon click Insert > Web Part (or add a Web Part to a Web Part zone) Under Media and Content select Content Editor and click Add With the new Web Part selected, from the ribbon click Format Text > HTML > Edit HTML Source Enter the following HTML / CSS and click OK <style type="text/css"> body #s4-leftpanel { display: none; } .s4-ca { margin-left: 0px; } </style> Hide the Web Part chrome by ...

[Note, this review is slightly off topic from my standard posts, if you want to learn more about SharePoint branding, scroll down to my previous posts. Thanks!] From the second I ordered my iPhone 4, I knew I was probably going to use a case to carry it around most of the time. This was even before “antenna-gate” proved to be an issue and everyone was told they were going to get a free case. Since I ordered online, my iPhone arrived before the stores had them, and by the time I decided to brave the crowds the Apple store was all out of cases (note: as of 7/21/2010 they still are out of all iPhone 4 cases in my area). So I went over to Best Buy and bought two temporary cases to try out and wasn’t super thrilled with them so I also ordered two online (with the plan to return whichever ones ...

Just a quick note to tell everyone that I have updated my starter master pages on CodePlex. I have made several minor tweaks that should help them be more “minimal” for easier use in your branding projects. Here are some of the bigger updates in this release: Additions to the SharePoint Server starter master page to include some My Site support A third starter master page that works with the Meeting Workspace (yes they still require a unique master page in 2010 but unlike in 2007, they are very similar to the standard master page) You can grab my latest starter master pages from: http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com If you still need the previous version here is the link: http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com/releases/view/36075